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I love this album so much and I think it has aged well. What a fantastic opening "Moving" is - I think I did a write up on it on the old forum for SOTW. The sequence "Feel It">"Oh to Be in Love">"L'Amour Looks Something Like You" is gorgeous and the title track works beautifully as a closer. This album ranks in the top half of Kate's catalogue.

In 1979, an interviewer asked Kate Bush — who had recently become the first woman to reach #1 on the UK charts with a self-written song, “Wuthering Heights,” at age 19 — “You’ve made it. What else is there to do?” Bush eagerly replied, “Everything!”

And she did. Bush, a cult figure in America who is regarded as a national treasure in the UK, created a legacy that has influenced countless musicians, many of whom might not even realize she made their work possible. How would most pop stars tour without the headset microphone, which was created for Bush’s 1979 Tour Of Life, using a wire hanger? Producing her own work in an industry in which a small percentage of women are producers, Kate Bush has maintained a level of control and integrity within her spellbinding music that few artists have matched. She opened the door for all artists, but especially women, to experiment more radically in their audio and visual work. As Imogen Heap once said, “When I was 17 and getting my first record deal, it was the likes of Kate Bush who had contributed to labels taking me seriously as a girl who knew what she was doing and wanted.” To be frank: Without Kate Bush, none of your faves would exist in the same capacity. That might sound hyperbolic, but there is so much, from turning live performances into multimedia, theatrical spectacles, to making music videos years before MTV’s debut, to wearing a swan dress — that Kate Bush did first.

Her groundbreaking legacy of experimental yet accessible, inspiringly individualistic work begins with the extraordinary debut album that turns 40 this weekend: The Kick Inside. Released when Bush was 19 in 1978, it included songs she had written as early as age 13 and introduced the world into Bush’s wild imagination. Arriving in a year otherwise dominated by disco and punk (“Wuthering Heights” replaced Abba’s “Take A Chance On Me” as the UK’s #1 single) this imagination felt “strangely out of time” and singular. The album’s focus on female sexuality, its use of voice as an instrument, and Bush’s unique storytelling techniques — particularly her exciting use of fluid narrative identity, in which she changes identities and narrative point of view with every song — created a new, unprecedented model for women in music. The Kick Inside (referred to as TKI from now on) made the world a safer place not just for women musicians but also for freaks and outcasts everywhere, and its anniversary is well worth celebrating.